“Beautifully written, [this anthology] allows the reader to experience the excitement of the field: the thrill of new insights, the denouncement of the passé, and the call to seek another horizon.”—Gayle Gullett, author of Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women’s Movement, 1880–1911

"The editors, all highly respectd specialists in the field of U.S. women's history, have brought together seventeen essays that make stunningly clear how the field has evolved, especially in the past three decades. ... All of the essays are richly documented.  Highly recommended."—Choice

In the last several decades, U.S. women’s history has come of age. Not only have historians challenged the national narrative on the basis of their rich explorations of the personal, the social, the economic, and the political.  They have entered into dialogues with each other over the meaning of women’s history itself.

In this collection of seventeen original essays on women’s lives from the colonial period to the present, contributors take the competing forces of race, gender, class, sexuality, religion, and region into account. They examine, for example, how conceptions of gender shaped immigration officials’ attitudes towards East Asian immigrants; how race and gender inequality pervaded the welfare state; and how color and class shaped Mexican American women’s mobilization for civil and labor rights.

Reading the past with all of the messiness, contradictions, and excitement inherent in real life, this book is a provocative meditation on the state of the field.

S. Jay Kleinberg is director of the Centre for American, Transatlantic, and Caribbean History at Brunel University, London, England, where she is a professor of history.

Eileen Boris holds the Hull Chair and is incoming chair of the women’s studies program at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Vicki L. Ruiz is a professor of history and Chicano/Latino studies and chair of the department of history at the University of California, Irvine.